Saturday, 1 August 2009

Chimpanzees also appreciate good music according to a new study by Tasuku Sugimoto and Kazuhide Hashiya of Kyushu University in Hakozaki, along with other Japanese colleagues.

According to Hashiya "Music is one of the universal human natures beyond cultures, just like language."

Key Points:

Infant chimpanzees demonstrate a preference for harmonious music over dissonant music.

Possibility this appreciation has evolved from the common ancestors of humans and modern apes.

Similar research on birds and cotton-top tamarin monkeys has found no preference for pleasant music.

It is speculated that a chimps' innate preference for pleasant music might have some survival function in the wild, for example distinguishing chimp voices from other forest sounds.

Experimental Methods:

A young captive chimpanzee named Sakura was tested to see how she would respond to music as she grew from 17 weeks to 23 weeks old.

Sakura had been abandoned by her mother at Itozu-no-mori Park in Fukuoka.

The park staff to give full care for Sakura.

Sakura had not experienced any form of music prior to the study.

In the experiments Sakura lay on a bed with a string attached to her right hand.

Sakura could pull the string when ever she wanted.

The string was attached to a music player set up in the room, which would play pleasant melodious music lasting between 38-63 seconds every time Sakura pulled the string.

During the six trials being held once a week for 20 minutes each, Sakura was played a broad range of music, including a 38 second minuet from Duette Englischer Meister in F major and a 38 second minuet from a handwritten sheet of German music from 1720.

The tunes were also adjusted with orchestration software to make them less pleasant (dissonant).

Sakura was played pleasant, harmonious pleasant music in half of the tests, and dissonant music in the other half.

Result:

Sakura consistently pulled the string far more to listen to the pleasant music than the discordant music.

Tuesday, 23 June 2009

The Berlin Zoo director, Bernhard Blaszkiewitz, nearly had his right index finger bitten off after offering a walnut to Pedro the chimpanzee. Blaszkiewitz underwent an 8-hour operation to reattach the finger but it became infected.

Pedro is the dominant chimpanzee at Berlin Zoo, and may have been demonstrating his dominance to the rest of the chimpanzee group at the time of the attack.

The following report (here) suggests humans may be more related to orangutans than chimpanzees.

Researchers propose new grouping for humans, orangutans and common ancestors and lay out a scenario of the migration and evolution of 'dental hominoids' in the Journal of Biogeography.

New evidence underscores the theory of human origin that suggests humans most likely share a common ancestor with orangutans, according to research from the University of Pittsburgh and the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Reporting in the June 18 edition of the Journal of Biogeography, the researchers reject as "problematic" the popular suggestion, based on DNA analysis, that humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, which they maintain is not supported by fossil evidence.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz, professor of anthropology in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences and president of the World Academy of Art and Science, and John Grehan, director of science at the Buffalo Museum, conducted a detailed analysis of the physical features of living and fossil apes that suggested humans, orangutans, and early apes belong to a group separate from chimpanzees and gorillas. They then constructed a scenario for how the human-orangutan common ancestor migrated between Southeast Asia—where modern orangutans are from—and other parts of the world and evolved into now-extinct apes and early humans. The study provides further evidence of the human-orangutan connection that Schwartz first proposed in his book The Red Ape: Orangutans and Human Origins, Revised and Updated (Westview Press, 2005).